Aging Florida Citrus Bowl gets mini-upgrade

November 18, 2010|By Mark Schlueb, Orlando Sentinel

A newly renovated Florida Citrus Bowl stadium will make its debut before tens of thousands of fans at the Florida Classic on Saturday.

The 74-year-old stadium didn't get the full-scale renovation that boosters have pined for because Orlando could only afford a mini-renovation. If the Citrus Bowl were an aging Hollywood starlet, this would be a few Botox treatments instead of a face-lift and liposuction.

Even so, longtime fans should notice the difference as they stroll around the stadium, buy food, watch the game — and even when nature calls.

In all, the city spent $10 million on the upgrades. That's far short of the $175 million approved by city and Orange County leaders in 2007, but those upgrades have been shelved indefinitely by the recession.

The biggest change will be underfoot when players from Bethune-Cookman and Florida A&M universities take the field. They'll play on AstroTurf Gameday Grass 3D instead of natural grass.

City officials decided to spend $1 million to install the artificial turf after a national television audience watched players in last season's Champs Sports and Capital One bowls slide around muddy clumps of loose sod.

"Everybody who has played on it has loved it," venues director Allen Johnson said. "We will not have any turf coming up this year."

The most noticeable of the new features are huge, mural-style banners that display photos of sporting events at the stadium. They brighten what had been a shadowy area, but the real purpose was to mask the rusty, Erector Set superstructure under the bowls.

The Citrus Bowl is somewhat infamous for the communal troughs in its men's restrooms. The city added four pairs of new restrooms in unused space under concourse ramps; this time, designers opted for standard urinals for the men.

The renovation also squeezed four new concession areas alongside the new restrooms. And because of telecommunications upgrades, customers will be able to pay with credit or debit cards for the first time.

New lighting brightens the concourse under the bowls, where fans enter. Likewise, improvements to the light towers over the field and the seating bowls make the stadium significantly brighter.

There are new LED ribbon boards between the bowls. Broken speakers in the scoreboard and elsewhere have been fixed, so fans should have an easier time hearing announcers.

Until now, workers had to print Ticketmaster tickets at Amway Arena and bring them to the stadium to be sold because the old ticket booth was short on technology. There's now a new box office with ticketing capabilities.

Other fixes may not be immediately apparent but combine to dress up the stadium a bit.

As they entered the stadium, patrons used to walk on a mix of surfaces: mulch, dirt, asphalt and concrete. The mulch and dirt are gone, replaced with a more uniform surface.

At some gates, chain-link fencing has been replaced with faux wrought iron. Old restrooms and concourses have been painted.

Most of the work was done by Turner Construction Co. and its subcontractors. The city hired some subcontractors directly, including those who installed the AstroTurf, and city employees worked on the stadium, too.

The project began months ago, but as the Florida Classic deadline approached, Turner Construction's workers have been on the job seven days a week, 14 hours a day, for the past six weeks. Crews had to clear out periodically as smaller events were held at the stadium, Turner Vice President Scott Skidelsky said.

The full-scale renovation was going to be paid for mostly with hotel taxes, but the project got delayed when Central Florida tourism and hotel visits plummeted with the economic downturn. The $10 million for the mini-renovation came from money the city borrowed against the future sale of the old Amway Arena, Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre and surrounding property.

The stadium's seating areas and bowls are still showing their age, but Mayor Buddy Dyer declared the scaled-back renovation a success.

"It is an unbelievable improvement for the amount of money we spent," Dyer said.